#681 Unconscious Errors

I suppose many of my humorous perceptions come from the fact that I was pretty slow on the uptake as a child, and so got teased a lot.
I tended to take the world too literally sometimes, so when an American word had a obvious meaning, or at least sounded like it did, my immature brain followed along in that direction, never questioning until someone pointed out my error by laughing at me.
I remember my 2nd grade classroom laughing uproariously when I mentioned aloud my belief that paratroopers came out of planes in groups of two.
After awhile I mentally distorted that laughter into a perception of approval. They weren’t laughing at me, they were laughing with me, I believed. Later, I really didn’t want to be with them, so I took control, sought out the laughter purposely and made sure that, in fact, they were laughing at me, and specifically the things I made them laugh at.
Wow.
Someone grab some psychotropic medication, I think this guy just had a pocket psychobabble attack.
Anyhow, that’s why I see words funny and why I sometimes insist on people knowing things about like, oh, unconscious redundancy of which they’re unaware.
Like the words chai tea. Chai is an old Chinese word that means tea. It’s another word for the same thing. Ordering a chai tea, even though it now carries with it the connotation of various spices and stuff, really means you are ordering a tea tea.
Which sounds a little like baby talk, possibly referring to some type of excremental function, like poo poo and pee pee.
So, while we’re on the subject of paratroopers, the reason it got me in trouble was because I had just learned about “o’clock.” My mom pronounced it “uh” not “oh.” I thought it was short for “of.” 3 o’clock, 3 of clock—made sense.
So the confusion with “pair of troopers” ensued.
Later, when my mind was in a different childlike state in the sixties, I wondered if you could get busted in a drug raid if you only have one phenalia. Or if you were only in danger when you had a pair of same.
America, ya gotta love it.